The US Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments in a case challenging a Colorado law prohibiting conversion therapy, which involves counseling gay or transgender counselees who question their gender identity or sexual orientation. The law prohibits therapists from discussing gender dysphoria and sexual orientation with minors unless they are “affirming” transgender identities or gay behaviors. Counseling children who struggle with those “identities” is verboten under the pretense that Colorado is regulating professional conduct and not infringing on the free speech of individual therapists.
Colorado’s Ban
Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy is joined by more than two dozen US states with similar laws. Kaley Chiles, a Christian counselor in Colorado, has challenged the law as an unconstitutional infringement of her First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and religious expression. Observers of the US Supreme Court justices’ questions and comments during oral argument report that the court is sympathetic to this position.
“Don’t ask, don’t tell” was a US military policy implemented by President Bill Clinton in 1993 that sought a middle ground for gay service members. They could serve so long as they concealed their sexual orientation. Much like Clinton’s legendary remark that he had smoked pot but “didn’t inhale,” this fence-sitting ambivalence did not age well.
A common refrain among supporters of gay marriage was similarly middle-of-the-road: Agree to disagree. However, the progressive push to glorify homosexual, bisexual, and gender-bending ideology in American school systems, and a cancel culture that vilifies anyone who disagrees, has created a sort of reverse-church government dogma: “Thou shalt never disagree with LGBT+.” Or as one pro-speech placard recently proclaimed, “Speech is not free when only one side gets to speak.”
One-sided Indoctrination
Schools and progressives across America now teach kindergartners about graphic sexual details in the name of liberation. This includes ”comprehensive sex education” instruction about anal sex, homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgenderism. Always in the name of tolerance, such teachings are profoundly intolerant of dissent by parents or “cis” children.
Teachers and therapists routinely encourage children to consider whether they are gay or trapped in a biological prison defined by their chromosomes but in which they do not “feel” like they belong. This latter condition, gender dysphoria, was long viewed by medical literature as a mental illness. In the nouveau social justice revolution, it is instead a healthy development for young minds that must be “affirmed” via puberty blockers, opposite-sex hormones, and even surgeries.
State governments have thus implemented a fuzzy science to rapidly shift children’s genders and sexual proclivities, while simultaneously banning anyone from taking exception, least not Jews, Muslims, or “intolerant” Christians. Wikipedia defines conversion therapy as “the pseudoscientific practice of attempting to change an individual's sexual orientation, romantic orientation, gender identity, or gender expression to align with heterosexual and cisgender norms.” Yet many critical thinkers, supported by a growing number of studies, suggest the “pseudoscience” is on the Drag Queen Story Hour side.
Oscar Wilde’s Conversion
Gay people are not “born that way” – homosexuality is chosen, and many people choose to reject that lifestyle just as many young people reject a promiscuous life in pursuit of monogamy. Oscar Wilde, for example, is mythologized as a paragon of homosexual rebellion, yet he converted to Catholicism on his deathbed – how dare the priest inflict conversion therapy on the brilliant playwright? Many young people today who declare themselves transgender later recant and seek to rejoin their biological selves. They are called “detransitioners.” Chloe Cole is a brave spokeswoman for the potential evils of rash transitioning, after undergoing a double mastectomy at age 15.
Yet progressive states would deny these young people appropriate counseling services, purportedly to protect them from those evil “cisgender norms.” Counselors like Kaley Chiles seek not to convert children to reconsider their paths toward homonormativity or transgenderism, but to listen to them and support them when they reconsider and seek help.
In her petition to the Supreme Court, Chiles’s attorneys wrote:
“Respected researchers who support LGBT advocacy have concluded that ‘arguments based on the immutability of sexual orientation are unscientific, given that scientific research does not indicate that sexual orientation is uniformly biologically determined at birth or that patterns of same-sex and other-sex attractions remain fixed over the life course.
“Most minors who experience gender dysphoria become comfortable with their biological sex if they are not affirmed in a transgender identity…. In jurisdictions with counseling restrictions, many young people cannot receive the care they seek – and critically need. An independent policy review commissioned by the English National Health Service noted the urgent and unmet need for mental health services to support ‘gender-questioning young people.’
“That result leaves detransitioners – those who adopted a transgender identity but now identify with their biological sex – with no counseling support whatsoever in much of the United States.”
The Free Speech Issue
The First Amendment question before the US Supreme Court is whether progressive state prohibitions against conversion therapy for such children are a permissible regulation of a profession or an unconstitutional restriction of individual liberties. Legislators are acting as would-be psychologists, creating pseudoscientific standards that prevent professionals from supporting children in need. There are no long-term studies of puberty blockers and synthetic hormones on young children – it is verboten to tell kids this simple fact under these statutes, lest one lose the right to counsel patients or be subjected to heavy fines.
What of species dysphoria, in which a person believes they are a furry (or scaly) animal trapped in a human body? Are state legislatures qualified to protect such people from chromosomal reality and compel others to call them not just by an infinity of novel pronouns, but their chosen creature du jour? Can the social justice crowd explain the scientific distinction between species dysphoria and gender dysphoria slowly, so the children can understand?
Chiles’ brief alleges that this is why the state of Colorado – and other similarly wayward jurisdictions – must be corrected, much like the “real science” that once condemned Down’s Syndrome children to institutions, or poor Native Americans to forced sterilization, or depression sufferers to lobotomies:
“Colorado’s law prohibits a category of persons – licensed counselors – from using certain ‘words about sexuality and gender.’... Worse, it prohibits only certain views on those topics. Only if a counselor’s views are ‘grounded in a particular viewpoint about sex, gender, and sexual ethics’ does the law apply. The law goes out of its way to exempt speech with which the State agrees. That is an ‘egregious’ violation of the First Amendment.”
If the Supreme Court determines a fundamental free speech right is implicated and applies a strict scrutiny standard to Colorado’s statute (as opposed to the “rational basis test” applied by the courts below), the case may be remanded to the lower courts to apply that higher standard. Such a ruling would be a death knell for all states banning conversion therapy, and perhaps a godsend for many children seeking counseling. Until then, gay and transgender kids who develop doubts about whether they have made the best decisions are trapped in a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” social justice dystopia that never agrees to disagree.
Liberty Vault: The Bill of Rights
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